I just recently purchased a canon ZR 700 camcorder and I seem to be expreiencing fuzzy DV capture (via firewire), however the picture on the A/V out (to the TV) is unbelieveably crisp.

I was wondering if there was a reason via encoding durring capture or whatever that would cause this.

I've heard that it may have something to do with interlacing.

BTW, I have a huge 300 GIG harddrive, so I don't have to worry about space for uncompressed video.


Thanks in Advance,
Duncan

Alright, so I'm not sure exactly what's wrong, but what I got from it so far is:

- I used a freeware app to get the jagged looking uncompressed video.
- I then compress it with Microsoft DV and it looks like shit.

Ya... that's about it. Can you help me please?

When you say fuzzy, do you mean it has lines through it?

Interlacing means that as the frame is refreshed on the screen only every other line is refreshed and then the alternate lines on the next refresh.

This is standard tv output, and as such your tv will be quite happy for you to feed this in and it will deal with it and it looks great on the screen. A pc and pc monitor is not built for interlaced output, it just shows what the codec tells it to show, which includes interlacing lines, especially in scenes with lots of movement.
It is also possible that the shutter speed on the camera was to slow for the amount of movement in the scenes. This will add motion blur and the interlacing will become more obvious.

If you are encoding to DVD to watch on the TV then the interlacing is no problem as that is what TVs n DVD players are happy with, just edit and see how it looks. if you are encoding to a PC/web based output(DivX,wmv,mov,etc), then make sure the encoder is set to de-interlace when you encode the final output.

Mike.

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Edius Pro, ADVC300

I FINALLY FOUND THE PROBLEM!!! Thank you. I was encoding with the Microsoft DV codec which was messing everything up. What I wanted to do was just transcode the uncompressed AVI to DVD! I did that and the only quality loss was from the transcoding. Thank you so much.

-Duncan